KEMPSTON, Thomas

More may be added to the earlier biography.5 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 512-13.

A lawyer by profession,6 JUST1/1535, rot. 10; CP40/687, rots. 549d, 566d, 579d. Kempston may have married more than once, given that his match with his only known spouse occurred relatively late in his life. Alice was previously the wife of Robert Gilbert of Gloucester, another lawyer and one of Kempston’s fellow MPs in the Parliaments of December 1421, 1422 and 1432. Not noticed in the previous biography, her marriage with Gilbert, who survived until the later 1430s, means that Kempston was her fourth rather than her third husband.

Among the surviving records of medieval Bedford is a deed featuring two other fifteenth-century Kempstons, presumably relatives of the MP. Dated 15 Aug. 1427, it is a quitclaim by which Thomas Hunt† of Bedford and others released to John Hawkyns alias Kempston all the lands, tenements, meadows and pastures in Bedford, Cardington Cotes, Harrowden and Fenlake that the widowed Joan Kempston had enfeoffed on them at some earlier date. As the then mayor of Bedford, the MP headed the list of those who witnessed the deed. The relationship between him, John and Joan is unknown, but one might speculate that she was the MP’s mother.7 Bedford bor. recs., deed, 1427, BorBE2/57.

Earlier in the same decade, in the spring of 1423, Kempston entered into a recognizance with the prominent Buckinghamshire lawyer, Andrew Sperlyng*, as a security for a debt of £10 which he owed the latter, but the circumstances in which the debt was contracted are unknown.8 E159/199, recogniciones Easter rot. 2d. Like Sperlyng, Kempston must have owed his prosperity to the profession they shared. He served his patron, Sir John Cornwall, as an attorney and he acted as such for John Colmyn and his wife in an assize of novel disseisin held at Bedford in the spring of 1423. By the early 1430s he was working in the court of common pleas, and among the clients he represented there was William Ludsopp*, another of Cornwall’s followers.9 JUST1/1535, rot. 10; CP40/687, rots. 549d, 566d, 579d; P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 210. The association with Cornwall, who was raised to the peerage as Lord Fanhope in 1432, dated back to at least the late 1420s, when Kempston quarrelled with the Bedfordshire j.p., Hugh Hasilden† of Goldington. On 24 Jul. 1427 Hasilden’s servant, John Meskeburgh, was seriously assaulted at Bedford and he died of his wounds four days later. An inquest held at Goldington on the 29th named William Chichele alias Spicer* and Thomas Cheltenham as the assailants and found that Kempston, then mayor of Bedford, had procured them to attack him. To forestall further trouble, the assize justices then in Bedfordshire took a recognizance for £100 from Hasilden on the 30th, to guarantee that he would appear before the King’s Council in the following autumn and do no harm to Kempston or any other Bedford man in the meantime. Hasilden duly appeared before the Council and received a discharge, but this was not the end of the matter since he enjoyed the powerful support of three of his fellow j.p.s, John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, and John Enderby*, with whom he presided over sessions of the peace in January 1428. At the sessions a jury indicted Kempston for raising the town of Bedford against Hasilden and for committing extortions against other men, some of them while he held the office of mayor. In response, Kempston produced sureties in the persons of Cornwall, Ludsopp and another of Cornwall’s retainers, but he, Chichele and Cheltenham were committed to the Marshalsea prison in London soon afterwards. Presumably, the bailiffs of Bedford fulfilled his duties as mayor while he was in custody. In the following Easter term Meskeburgh’s widow brought an appeal for murder against the three men in the court of King’s bench. The case was referred to trial, with Kempston and Chichele obtaining bail in the meantime and Cornwall again standing surety for the former. In the end, the appeal came to nothing, since a jury sitting at Westminster found Kempston and his co-defendants not guilty in the autumn of 1428.10 Maddern, 217-18; KB27/668, rot. 79, rex rot. 19; 671, rex rot. 3; PPC, iii. 280-1 (misread by Maddern). Within a decade of Meskeburgh’s death, however, Kempston and Chichele fell out with each other, for by 1436 the MP was suing the latter at Westminster over an alleged debt of over 40s.11 CP40/734, rot. 220d.

Shortly after his acquittal in 1428, Kempston claimed that he himself had been the victim of a murderous assault. In January 1429 he began a suit in King’s bench against Ralph Goldyng, a baker from Bedford, asserting that Goldyng and six other men from the town had attacked and attempted to murder him there almost a year earlier. In his defence, Goldyng said that several months after the assault he and his associates had settled their quarrel with Kempston through arbitration at Framlingham in Suffolk. He said that they had compensated the MP with a couple of gallons of wine in accordance with an award made by two arbiters, John Porter and Richard Rosyngton, meaning that he no longer had any case to answer. Kempston countered Goldyng’s plea by insisting that no such arbitration process had occurred. Although referred to an inquest in Suffolk, the matter appears not to have reached a formal conclusion. Perhaps the duke of Norfolk had intervened between Kempston and his opponents, since Framlingham was where one of his main residences lay. While it is impossible to connect the quarrel with the Meskeburgh affair, it is of interest in its own right for Kempston’s action in King’s bench reveals that he had links with Thomas Wydeville*, whose properties included a manor at Biddenham just outside Bedford. The suit included the stock allegation that the assault he had suffered had left him too fearful to go about his everyday business, of which he mentioned his duty of holding manorial courts on behalf of Wydeville and other (unnamed) ‘masters’. It would appear, therefore, that he was Wydeville’s steward, an appropriate position for a man of his legal background.12 KB27/671, rot. 62d; 673, rot. 18d.

Although potentially damaging, Kempston’s indictment for extortion in January 1428 had no serious repercussions for his public career, for after this date he sat for Bedford in at least eight Parliaments (six of them consecutive), was frequently mayor and served another term as under sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire at the end of the 1430s. During his fifth term in the mayoralty he obtained a royal pardon (dated 20 July 1447),13 C67/39, m. 19. although whether in connexion with that office is unknown. The previous biography failed to realise that Kempston served his first term as mayor in 1425-6 and incorrectly assumed that he also served as such in 1448-50.14 In fact, Reynold Ive was mayor in 1448-9 and Thomas Bole in 1449-50: C219/15/6; C241/235/83. Furthermore, while not realizing that he began a seventh term in that office in 1457, it suggested that he retired from public life in 1450, even though his last Parliament sat until May 1451. As for the Thomas Brown who entered into recognizances to Kempston and John Pury* a few weeks after the dissolution of that assembly, he was another MP, Thomas Brown IV*, one of the Members for Wallingford in the previous Parliament. Elected mayor for the last time shortly before he made his will, Kempston died in office, obliging the borough to elect John Sperry in his place. His widow received a royal pardon in December 1462.15 C67/45, m. 17; Bor. BY89.